Product Description

For Marcus Didius Falco, agent to the Emperor Vespasian, Alexandria holds fascination and a hint of fear. Beautiful, historic and famously unruly, the great cosmopolitan city wears Roman rule lightly. While his wife, Helena Justina, wants to see the Lighthouse and the Pyramids, Falco has a mission at the Great Library that soon turns out to involve much more than stock-taking its innumerable scrolls. A mysterious death in the world-famous library bring him into immediate conflict with the darker side of academic life. With forensic science in its infancy, even an illegal autopsy fails to find real answers.To solve the crime for the Roman Prefect - if indeed it is a crime - Falco will have to draw on his own doggedness and intuition, at first supported only by Helena's commonsense and the loyal backup of her brother Aulus, who goes under cover as a student among the in-fighting academics. The philosophers lust after fame and fortune so ruthlessly there is soon another terrifying death, this time at the royal zoo. At the same time, his original innocent mission is overshadowed by the machinations of his Uncle Fulvius, who is living in Alexandria with his partner Cassius for obscure reasons. Their involvement in local affairs already seems shady when they are joined by their crony, Falco's father, Geminus, a man well known for disreputable business practices. If the irrepressible Pa has had any hand in what has gone wrong at the Library, Falco knows he stands no chance...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10299 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

About the Author
Lindsey Davis has written twenty novels, beginning with The Course of Honour, the love story of the Emperor Vespasian and Antonia Caenis. Her bestselling mystery series features laid-back First Century detective Marcus Didius Falco and his partner Helena Justina, plus friends, relations, pets and bitter enemy the Chief Spy. Her books are translated into many languages and serialised on BBC Radio 4. Past Chair of the Crimewriters' Association and a Vice President of the Classical Association, she has won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, the Dagger in the Library, and a Sherlock award for Falco as Best Comic Detective. She was born in Birmingham but now lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Falco 19: the body in the Great Library

This is number nineteen in a series of excellent detective stories set in Vespasian's Roman Empire and featuring the informer Marcus Didius Falco. It has perhaps the best opening in the series so far:

"They say you can see the Lighthouse from thirty miles away. Not in the day, you can't."

Informers in ancient Rome were something between a private detective and a government spy: in the cast list at the start of the book Falco now describes himself as "fixer, traveller and playwright."

It is spring AD77. Falco's wife Helena Justina has always wanted to see all of the "Seven Wonders of the World". In a previous book, "See Delphi and Die" Falco and Helena have seen the Temple of Zeus at Olympus. Falco writes that they had also visited Athens on the same trip.

(Pedant alert: there was more than one ancient list of the seven wonders of the world, but neither the traditional list of seven wonders compiled by Philo of Byzantium in 225 BC, nor any of the other contemporary versions I can find, include the Parthenon or anything else at Athens. Never mind.)

When Helena gets an invitation to pay a family visit to Falco's uncle in Alexandria, she realises that accepting the invitation would give her the opportunity to see three more wonders. These are the Colossus of Rhodes (which they saw on the way to Alexandria before the start of this book), the Pharos or Great Lighthouse at Alexandria, and the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Gisa.

The visit will also take in the Great Library at Alexandria, and it turns out that Emperor Vespasian has a little job he wants done which requires a trip to the Great Library. So, despite the fact that Helena is several months pregnant with their third child, Falco accepts the mission and they set off for Alexandria with the family.

But the morning after they arrive in Alexandria, a centurion interrupts their breakfast with news of, to paraphrase an Agatha Christie title, a body in the Great Library. The librarian himself has been found in his office, apparently murdered. As he is known to be the Emperor's fixer, Falco is asked to investigate ...

To judge by the other reviews, some readers feel that this series is losing a bit of its' edge, but personally I am not one of them. I found the humour delightful and apart from the slight clanger about the list of wonders I thought there were a lot of interesting historical details added about the first century empire.

I originally tried this series because I had enjoyed Ellis Peters' "Brother Cadfael" detective stories. Where Cadfael is excellent, Falco is brilliant. Ellis Peters herself (or to use her real name, Edith Pargeter) said of the early books of the series, 'Lindsey Davis continues her exploration of Vespasian's Rome and Marcus Didius Falco's Italy with the same wit and gusto that made "The Silver Pigs" such a dazzling debut and her rueful, self-deprecating hero so irresistibly likeable.'

Funny, exciting, and based on a painstaking effort to re-create the world of the early Roman empire between 70 and 77 AD.

It isn't absolutely essential to read these stories in sequence, as the mysteries Falco is trying to solve are all self-contained stories and each can stand on its own. Having said that, there is some ongoing development of characters and relationships and I think reading them in the right order does improve the experience.

The full Falco series, in chronological order, consists at the moment of:

The Silver Pigs
Shadows in Bronze
Venus in Copper
The Iron Hand of Mars
Poseidon's Gold
Last Act in Palmyra
Time to Depart
A Dying Light in Corduba
Three Hands in the Fountain
Two for the Lions
One Virgin Too Many
Ode to a Banker
A Body in the Bath house
The Jupiter Myth
The Accusers
Scandal taks a Holiday
See Delphi and Die
Saturnalia
Alexandria
Nemesis (Due June 2010)

I can warmly recommend all of the books in this series published to date. (Obviously not "Nemesis" yet!)

Alexandria - Lindsey Davis
An excellent addtion to the Falco series; greatly anticipated, much enjoyed. The cast of characters included several new faces, we could however, have had a few new personalities that are going to hang around a bit longer. The bad guy's are new, but you have to determine between Falco's judgement or their actions to identify them. With regular bad guys, (Anacrities, etc) you can look forward to bad things happening. Falco has worked with his father before, (Poseidon's Gold) where they combined their efforts successfully. I think it's about time Lindsey Davis had Falco and his father on the same side, they don't have to be best buddies, (Petro Longinus is that), but it could work with a lot of banter and friction between them.

All told this is another fine description of roman life, with the addition that it gives a good pen portrait of Alexandria, (I thought Julius Caeser burned down the whole library!).

Falco still going strong
For many years I have enjoyed the adventures of Marcus Didius Falco, the streetwise Roman detective created by Lindsey Davis. From his rough origins as an informer in first century A.D. Rome to his slightly more staid middle-class status in the later novels, Falco never fails to entertain. The plots of these novels is always good, with plenty of interesting characters (as well as sinister ones) and no lack of action.
What lifts Miss Davis work above the mainstream of crime fiction is her sense of humor combined with her talent for creating memorable characters.
Falco comes complete with a huge family of complete misfits, most of them instantly recognizable to most readers because we all have an auntie or uncle who is just like that. This particular novel is set in ancient Egypt and is certainly up to the usual high standard. Warmly recommended to wile away a rainy day!